The Membranes

by Chi Ta-wei

An impenetrable barrier existed between her body and the material world.

Membranes filtered Momo’s every impression of the world. At thirty, she felt there was at least one layer of membrane between her and the world. Not the kind of membrane she applied to her clients receiving facials at work, obviously. The invisible kind. The kind that made her feel sort of like a tiny water flea—a Daphnia encased in a cell, swimming alone out to sea. The ocean surrounded her body but never touched her.

It was just that maybe she was better suited to another space, another world: a misfit peach, unsatisfied with its home tree and dreaming of growing on a different tree.

“In China there’s a legend that ‘peach splitting’—when you share a peach with a friend—is the mark of an extraordinary friendship, the kind that other people wouldn’t understand.

She’d rather make a poor decision for herself, acting on her own desires, than have it made by someone else.

The discbooks mentioned the twentieth-century French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, and quoted Lacan as saying that very young children cannot distinguish the difference between self and other. Only between six and eighteen months of age, when a child looks in a mirror (including symbolic as well as material mirrors), will she acquire an individual sense of self. By looking in the mirror, the toddler realizes that in the mirror world there is a child just like herself, whose every move is the exact mirror of her own, and yet who is not her. A child’s awareness of her own existence depends on the existence of this “other,” and this window between six and eighteen months is so significant it’s known as the “Mirror Stage.”

When a child failed to detach from the parent in a timely fashion, were the obsessive behaviors and arrested development the child’s fault? Or was the mother to blame, for overindulging her? Or maybe the responsibility lay with neither the child nor the mother. What was so wrong with not weaning a child? Why force a child to grow up? If a child refused, why place blame on anyone? Why not just not grow up? Why did such a tyrannical social imperative exist in the first place?

An ancient sage known as Derrida once spoke of “différance,” whereby your well-intentioned pursuit of the authenticity of sensory experience only produces endless variations, shifts, and evolutions; the meaning you seek, inconstant and ephemeral, is elusive as a chameleon. “Mise en abyme,” they say—no matter how many layers of clothing you fold back, another layer of clothing always lies underneath; every password you enter yields another request for a password; within the darkness of the abyss always lies another abyss.